Zingtree Tags: support tool

Everyone prefers their own way of creating, and it can come in many forms. To address this, we built Zingtree with a few different ways to design and construct an interactive decision tree (as well as some great ways to publish them!). For the more visual learner, the Zingtree Visual Designer allows you to draw out your decision tree.

This “whiteboard” style lets users create nodes, along with their connections, and see the nitty gritty details of how the tree functions all on one screen. In terms of ease-of-use and full-scale layout views, Visual Designer really can’t be beaten.

Here’s how to get started with the Visual Designer:

1. Once you log in to your Zingtree account and start Designer, you’ll see a screen that looks like the one shown below, with one node already in place as a green box. This is the very first node your users will see and interact with.

2. Double-click on the Node you’d like to change and an edit window will pop up conveniently to dig into. You can edit the Title, Question and main Content segments to your liking, as well as add in any Data Entry fields.

3. Drag new nodes into the design area – these correspond to the pages in your decision tree. Again, select the green box to edit each node’s Question, Content, etc.

4. Add a Final Answer Node and edit to fit your needs, when you’re ready. These will appear in blue, to differentiate from your green Question Nodes.

5. Continue dragging new nodes into the design area to create these Questions & Answer Nodes, and then connect them using labeled arrows. The connecting arrows represent the button selections from each node.

6. Finish linking all of your nodes using this method, and you’ll end up with a finished product that looks something like this image below. You can click on any node or button/arrow to highlight connections and see more detail.

Please keep in mind that things can get confusing for more complex trees that require more nodes.

BONUS TIP!Automatically re-arrange the nodes in your decision tree visually with just a single click, so you can more easily see every node and connection without constantly opening each one.

For a more in-depth tutorial, watch this video to see how to build the example tree above using Zingtree Designer:

Interactive decision trees can be an extremely simple, fun way to navigate through your information, find answers to questions and more. The Zingtree Wizard tool is one such way to build out decision trees in a clean, step-by-step process.

With the Wizard, you’ll be prompted to fill out easy forms in order to generate your tree, providing the questions and answers your end-users will see. It’s one of the most straight-forward ways to generate a Zingtree!

Here’s how to use Zingtree Wizard:

1. Sign in and click My Trees > Create New Tree.

2. Select the option to fill out simple forms, and then give your tree a name and description.

3. Once in the Wizard, fill out some body text to get started with your tree.

4. Write out your first question, then fill the Answer Options section with every answer you’d like provided. You can see a live preview appear to the right of the screen as you move forward.

5. Continue to write out the appropriate questions, answers and final path solutions until every connection in your decision tree is made.

6. When you’re finished making the nodes and connections between them, you can take a full look at your finished decision tree in Overview.

Voila! Your masterpiece is complete, interactive and highly-intelligent. You can also watch this video for a guided tutorial on how to use the Wizard tool:

Some of our corporate customers have asked about ways to restrict access to their trees to a specific IP address or range. This week’s update lets you do just that.

Using CIDR notation, you can add a series of IP addresses as white lists. Any request coming from outside the range you designate will be denied access. If you opt out of restricting access, the entire world will be able to view your tree. You can read more about CIDR here.
Here’s how to restrict access to your decision trees:

After publishing our article on result tracking with Zingtree, it occurred to us that we could do even better.

Rather than having to wait for people to use your decision trees to see results, we decided it would be much more useful to be able to show successes, failures, and undecided results immediately whenever you change the category of any node.

So if you have a tree that’s been in use, go back and categorize each node using Overview > Edit Node. Then, view the Results report to see how successful your tree has been. If you change the category of a node, results reporting updates instantly!

Some other updates with this release:

New: You can use zt-name and zt-email for data entry variable names to have these automatically propagate into email submit form fields for name and email (h/t Todd).

New: Insert #source# or #agent# in any question or final answer node to insert the name of the agent using the tree (h/t Nilou).

New: You can add Custom CSS to ALL your trees using a new checkbox in any tree’s Settings.

Bug fix: You can no longer remove yourself as a collaborator when there are no other admins.

Update: The ‘A’ button in the history area now hides goto link (ht/t Bill S.).

We created the Zingtree Gallery with you in mind, making it simple to generate powerful decision trees to fit your needs. In the online Gallery, you’ll find a helpful selection of pre-made Trees that can be explored, copied and customized for any project.

The existing decision trees in the Zingtree Gallery have all been created by other Zingtree authors, and are free to use for inspiration or duplication. You’ll find robust, pre-made decision trees spanning many key areas, including Customer Support / Troubleshooting, Call Centers, Training, Medical, and more.

All of the trees found in our online Gallery are free to view, export, or embed into your own website. You can even view live usage statistics and graphs, or submit your own generated Tree to help others!